OfflineApps

Notes from UI/Policy Discussion on Feb-21-2007

attendees: bsmedberg, beltzner, baz, roc, mfinkle, vlad, dria, dcamp

Existing UI for online/offline

• "Work Offline" menu option is the only UI for this
• platform support for auto-detect of on/offline enabled for w32 and linux on trunk
  • windows doesn't work very well, especially if auto-dial or auto-connect is enabled at the OS level
  • need someone to do this for Mac

Required UI for offline apps

• how do we detect when an application can be made available offline?
  • basic mechanism is to specify a link tag that points to the offline resources
  • for complicated scenarios where the page is using script to populate offline content, it'll be trickier
  • we could require that the application link to itself, detecting a link tag is the simplest/easiest way to go
  • but need to give user control for this, which is where bookmarking comes in (through bookmarking or infobar notification/confirmation, or "make this available offline" UI)
• can applications be made available offline if they're not designed for that?
  • not reliably, although we can do this for static webpages
  • it might be worth looking into it, but it feels like another work item
  • there are some tricks we can do with recursive gets, pulling down scripts and packing them in JARs which we rewrite the page to point to, etc
  • might not be interesting as it's unlikely to work
  • could work for static pages
• need UI for: "make this page available offline" and some way of indicating if the application can be made available offline
• model question: is it application or firefox that goes online/offline?
  • should be Firefox, we all thought
• need to indicate if the application is online or offline atm
  • should be able to change modes transparently and dynamically

Interaction with other UI

• Bookmarking/History
  • checkbox for "make this available offline"
  • show in bookmark list what's available offline
  • state of our cache sucks currently, it's impossible to know what pages exist in cache, what will work when you're offline, there's a lot of intersection with general offline mode stuff

• Feed reading
  • do we want to cache the content of the last N live bookmarks?
  • "they're not very live at that point, are they?"
  • does this make us too much like a feed reader?

• Error Pages
  • the "go back online" error page could try to get people back online

• Preferences
  • "always fetch applications that are available offline"
  • "never enable offline applications"
  • hidden / shown
  • we currently do fetch all the applications we see
  • adding values for DOM cache and offline storage cache
  • tie-in with per-site preferences

• User Facing Management Options
  • need to show users how the disk is being used
  • might want to show list of cached apps, provide UI for removing them
  • need to map out user interaction flows for:
    • no more room for offline apps within storage quotas
    • user wants to purge application from offline cache
    • user wants to sync up all offline applications
    • user wants to monitor how much space is being used by offline applications (or just by their profile)

Impact to profile size

• don't think we need to worry about this too much in a world of large disk
• should have some monitoring ability, though
• as per above, do we want to have some add/delete functionality?

Offline Apps Policy

• How much offline cache space should offline apps be able to use?
  • make default sizes depend on free disk space
  • an iPod like slider with "less" and "more"
  • express cost of caching an application offline to user at the point of caching, ask if they want to allow it
• what happens when we don't have enough space?
  • ask the user if they want to add more space? purge older apps?
  • see above "user facing management options"
• should we aggregate the quotas for DOM storage and cache?
  • that seems to be simplest
  • combine with disk cache, even
  • proposal: single control "Let Firefox use x% of disk space"
• need to expose available space to app, and get quota information/suggestions from app
  • leave it up to the web application to provide preferences for degree of offline caching
  • have some default data space for applications that just want to "fill all space available", maybe 10MB/application? %age of free cache space?
• we will not try to create unified synchronization model, instead allow applications to sync when they connect back to their hosted website
  • have quick ways to open all offline apps when online which will trigger synchronization
  • could do this in background tabs

DOM Storage Policy

• uh, I'll be honest and say I didn't catch much here
• something about aggregating within a TLD to prevent abuse?